Shri Madhavdas Ji

Before the sun had cleared the dunes at Puri, the doors of the inner sanctum swung open and the priests knew at once that something was wrong. The golden thali on which the Lord's night offering had been laid was gone from its place. Men fanned out across the temple grounds, along the walls, down toward the sea, until someone found it lying untouched and still gleaming beside a gaunt, wind-scoured stranger asleep near the shore, a man who had been living rough at the edge of the temple precincts for weeks, murmuring the Name to himself at odd hours, thin as a reed from fasting. Nobody paused to ask the obvious question: if this ragged man had stolen a golden plate, why would he leave it sitting in plain sight next to his own sleeping body? The priests did not ask. They bound his wrists and beat him with cane rods until his back opened in welts, then left him where he lay in the sand, disgraced and bleeding, while the town went on waking around him as if nothing at all had happened.

To understand why he was there, on that beach, taking a beating for a theft he had not committed, you have to go back a little further, to the house he had once kept far from Puri, where he had lived as a settled, learned man, well versed in the old Sanskrit texts, with a wife, a small son, and an aging mother under his roof. Then his wife died. In the strange stillness that follows a death, watching his own household rearrange itself around the hole she had left, something in him broke open that never quite closed again. He had wanted, he later said, only the ordinary things: to see the boy grow, the family thicken and continue. But watching his wife's body go cold he understood, not as an idea but as something felt in the skin, that every body he loved, his mother's, his son's, his own, was being carried along by a will that was never his to begin with. If Parameshvara alone sustained them, and would go on sustaining them long after he himself was dust, then what exactly had he been guarding all those years. Only his own pride of ownership, he decided. Only the shadow of a shadow. He walked out of that house without ceremony or farewell, made his way to Nilachala, the hill by the sea at Puri where the ancient temple of Jagannath stands, the dark and wide-eyed carved form he had held as his ishta-deva his whole life, took darshan of the deity, and then went down to where the hill meets the water and simply lay down. He surrendered hunger. He surrendered thirst. He gave no thought at all to how long this might take. Three days passed with his mind turned entirely inward on Hari-smarana, remembrance of the Lord, while the tide came and went beside him like breathing.

What the beach could not see was what was happening inside the sanctum. Jagannath could not bear it. His bhakta had gone three days without a grain of food, alone on the open shore with no one to so much as offer him a lota of water, and the Lord of all the worlds found that he could not sit still and merely watch. He sent Lakshmi herself, carrying the very thali prepared for his own night meal, its rice and sweets already touched by him and so transformed into mahaprasad. She went out past the sleeping guards, her anklets making a soft chime against the sand, to where Madhavdas sat with his back to the sea, lost in the inward vision of Shyamasundara. She set the plate beside him without a word and turned to go. He caught only a flash of her, gone as fast as lightning across a clear sky, no more than that. But the plate was there, undeniably, and when he understood what it was he pressed his face to the ground, called himself the most fortunate of men, and ate.

This, of course, was the very thali the panda found missing from the sanctum floor the following dawn, the one they discovered gleaming beside him on the beach, the one whose disappearance had earned him a beating. And this is what unraveled the whole affair. Some days later, as the attendants performed the ordinary rites of bathing and anointing the deity's wooden body with oil, they found long raised welts across Jagannath's own back, in the same pattern as the strokes they themselves had laid across a beggar's shoulders. The oil rag stopped in someone's hand. Word passed through the temple in whispers before it was ever spoken aloud: the Lord had taken the marks of that beating onto his own body, because it was he who had given the plate, and a gift once given cannot afterward be called a theft. The priests went and found Madhavdasji and fell at his feet weeping, begging forgiveness, which he gave freely and without a trace of triumph in his voice. Within days the story had traveled through every lane of Puri, and Madhavdasji, who wanted nothing so much as to be left alone with his Lord, found himself surrounded by admirers wherever he went, a kind of fame he had never asked for and could not shake off no matter how visibly it embarrassed him.

In the years that followed, his worship inside that temple grew so rapt that he seemed to forget he had a body at all. He would stand before the murti of Jagadisha, unblinking, hour folding into hour, until the hinges of his own joints seemed to dissolve. By some working of the Lord's own will, the attendants would somehow fail to notice him standing there when the great doors were shut for the night, and he would remain locked inside, alone with his Lord until morning. One night, deep in the damp chill of the coastal winter, the cold reached through the stone floor and seized him where he stood, and he began to shiver uncontrollably in the dark. At that same hour, in the sanctum, Jagannath himself began to tremble. The priests were pulled from sleep by an urgency they could not name, some instruction moving through their dreams, and rose to find a fresh blanket and bring it in. With his own hands, it is remembered, the Lord wrapped it around his shivering bhakta. Madhavdasji woke to find himself covered in warmth he had not asked for, understood at once whose hands had placed it there, and wept, holding the prasadi cloth against his chest, filled with a love too large for his own ribs to contain.

Some time after this came the illness: sangrahani, a wasting disease of the bowels that strips a person of strength and, worse, of dignity. Too weak to fetch his own water, too proud or too forgotten to ask anyone else, he dragged himself down to the shore where he could at least clean himself with seawater. And there, once again, Jagannath came in person, knelt beside him, and washed his body with his own hands, the way a mother washes a sick child. Madhavdasji looked up and knew who was kneeling over him. He folded his trembling hands and said, you have set aside your own lordliness to do such a low and humbling thing, and it causes me more suffering than the disease itself. Prabhu answered him simply: what else can I do, I cannot bear even a moment to watch my own bhaktas suffer. Then why, Madhavdasji asked, do you not simply take the suffering away entirely? And the Lord gave him an answer that has been carried in the memory of this story ever since: if I erase it outright, the debt of karma behind it goes unspent, and you would only have to take another body somewhere else to burn through what remains. So I have not removed your pain. I have set aside my Ishvara-ta, my very lordship, to sit inside it with you instead. He added one more reason, almost as an aside: that no one should ever be able to look at a suffering bhakta lying alone on a beach with no one to bring him water and conclude that devotion bears no fruit. That misreading, he said, cuts at the root of everything. And in the same breath in which he spoke, by nothing more than his darshan and his touch, all of Madhavdasji's pain simply vanished, in front of his own eyes, before he had even finished being amazed by it. Whatever the temple's priests would give you today as the formal ritual reason, this is the story generations of Puri's own devotees have quietly told their children about why, once every year, after the great bathing festival, Jagannath is said to fall ill and withdraw behind closed doors for a fortnight before the chariots of Ratha Yatra roll: that some residue of those days by the sea still returns to him, out of love, once a year.

Madhavdasji went on begging his bhiksha each morning the way any wandering renunciate does, with nothing left to protect and nothing to lose by asking. One day he came to the door of a poor old woman who was on her knees in her courtyard, plastering the mud floor with wet clay, sweating and exhausted. He asked for alms once, then again. Something in her snapped. She snatched up the filthy rag she had been plastering with and flung it at him in fury. He did not flinch and he did not walk away angry. He thought instead, in that instant, well, she has given me something after all, and picked the cloth up gently from where it had struck him. He carried it to the sea, washed it clean, twisted its threads into wicks, and that evening lit the lamps of Jagannath's own temple with them. The moment light rose inside the sanctum, something shifted in the old woman too, though she was nowhere near the temple to see it. A darkness she had carried for years quietly lifted from her chest. The next morning, when he came again to her door to beg exactly as he had the day before, she took one look at him and collapsed at his feet in tears, transformed by a grace she had done nothing to earn and could not explain. From that day she spent what wealth she had in the plain service of wandering sadhus. It is a strange kind of teaching, but Madhavdasji's whole life bears it out: a heart that refuses to close, even against an insult flung at its own face, becomes the very place through which someone else's darkness finally finds a way out.

His fame, unwelcome as it was to him, eventually reached a certain traveling pandit who had defeated every scholar in every direction of the country and arrived in Puri looking for one more contest to win. The local pandits, terrified of his learning, told him: if you can defeat Madhavdasji, you will have defeated all of us at once. He went and demanded a formal debate. Madhavdasji answered only, we have already lost to you, and wrote the concession out himself, in his own hand. Delighted, the pandit carried this signed defeat all the way to Kashi to display before the assembled scholars there. But when he unrolled the paper to read it aloud, the words on the page had changed: Madhavdasji has won, and the great pandit has lost. Furious, certain he had been tricked, the pandit stormed back to Puri and confronted him again, this time with a wager attached: if I win, I will bind shoes to both your ears, paint your face black, mount you backward on a donkey, and parade you through every street in this city. Madhavdasji answered mildly that he would just go bathe first, and walked off toward the water, leaving the debate for later. While he was gone, Jagannath himself took on Madhavdasji's exact form, sat down opposite the pandit, and defeated him so thoroughly that there was nothing left to argue. True to his own wager, the pandit was blackened, shod at the ears, and paraded through the whole of Puri on a donkey, with a laughing crowd trailing behind clapping their hands, Jagannath himself said to be walking somewhere among them, thoroughly enjoying the spectacle he had arranged. When the real Madhavdasji learned what had actually happened in his absence, he was troubled rather than pleased. He went straight to the humiliated man, helped him down from the donkey with his own hands, and instead of gloating, spent a long while teaching him gently that the only real cure for the kind of pride that drags a person from town to town looking for someone to defeat is sadhu-seva, the plain service of those further along the path than yourself.

For years he had sat in Puri singing the Vraj-lilas of Krishna without ever laying eyes on the actual land where they had unfolded, and eventually a longing rose in him too strong to sit through, and he set out walking for Vrindavan. Along the road, a devout woman in one village took him into her home with obvious joy and set a meal before him. As he sat eating, a dark, beautiful boy of about ten years old appeared and stood close beside him, though no one had seen him arrive. The woman looked at the child and began to weep. When Madhavdasji asked her why, she said, whose lovely dark-skinned son have you charmed into following you, how will his own mother bear to lose him. He understood at once who the boy really was and was overtaken himself, all over again, by the same wave of prema that had first pulled him out of his old life. Further along the road he came to the house of a merchant devotee who had once met him in Puri years before, given him his name and village, and begged him: if you ever pass through Vrindavan, please give me your darshan. The merchant himself was away when Madhavdasji arrived, and the only person present besides his devoted wife was a visiting Vaishnav mahant, who, told that another wandering saint had come to the door, answered flatly that there was no room here. The merchant's wife, mortified, begged Madhavdasji to let her cook for him anyway. He asked only for whatever was already prepared, and she brought him sweetened milk, which he offered inwardly to Prabhu before drinking, telling her simply to let her husband know that Jagannathi Madhavdas had passed through. When the merchant returned and heard the name, he ran into the road with the mahant close behind him, caught Madhavdasji's feet, and brought him home overjoyed, at which Madhavdasji blessed them both, telling the husband that a wife of such devotion made him a fortunate man indeed. The mahant, ashamed, folded his hands and asked how he could undo his own rudeness. For as long as you live, Madhavdasji told him, serve the leftover prasad of Vaishnavas, and whenever one arrives at your door, rise, bow, and welcome him. Keep this quietly in your heart. That is the only remedy there is.

Arriving in Vrindavan at last, so overwhelmed with joy that he could hardly speak, he went first to the temple of Bankebihariji, where someone near the gate pressed a handful of roasted chickpeas into his hands as alms. Told he could wait a little for the temple's own elaborate offering to be distributed as prasad, he decided his hunger would be satisfied well enough by the chickpeas alone, walked down to the cool groves along the Yamuna, offered them inwardly to Gopalalal, and sat down content. Inside the temple at that very hour, an elaborate spread of rich dishes had been laid before the deity, and the resident swami, some traditions name him as Haridas himself, the temple's own founding saint, sat absorbed in meditation, when Bihariji spoke through his inward vision: I have no hunger for any of this, a beloved bhakta of mine has already fed me roasted chickpeas with his whole heart, and I have eaten my fill. Astonished, the swami sent people running to find this bhakta, and they brought Madhavdasji back, who told them plainly what had happened. The swami laughed and gently scolded him anyway: renouncing the world is a fine thing, but walking off with nothing more than a fistful of chickpeas while turning your back on Rasikaraj Bihariji's own prasad is not quite the same virtue. Madhavdasji accepted the correction with a smile, understanding that the Lord is simply hungry for whatever is offered with a full heart, no more and no less.

Roaming further through the sacred groves of Braj, he came to Bhandiravata, the great banyan grove of Krishna's own childhood games, where a renunciate named Khamandas lived alone in a small kutiya and at first would not even let him inside. When he stayed anyway, Khamandas fed him nothing but dry, plain scraps while secretly cooking himself a rich bowl of kheer each night after his guest had gone to sleep. Madhavdasji saw through the pretense without needing to be told, and one night the hidden bowl of sweet rice, before Khamandas's own horrified eyes, turned to a mass of crawling worms in his hands. Undone with shame, Khamandas fell at his feet, and Madhavdasji spent a long while afterward teaching him, without a trace of scorn, that sant-seva, the honest service of those who visit you, is worth more than any secret sweetness kept for yourself. Further on, in a village where the Bhagavata was being recited with unusual beauty, he stayed simply to listen, so free of any wish to be noticed that he himself gathered cow dung with his bare hands and patted it into fuel cakes for the cooking fires, until the people there learned who their humble helper actually was and fell, astonished, at his feet.

On his way back at last toward Puri, the road happened to pass near the very village he had once called home, and something in him wanted, just once, to hear how his mother and his son were faring. Someone ran ahead to tell her: your son has come. His mother's answer, when it reached him, was not the welcome he might have half expected. My son became a true renunciate, she said, with what sounded like pride rather than complaint; such a son does not come back to sit in his mother's house; he is not so poor a thing as that. Hearing his own mother turn his renunciation into a blessing rather than a wound, Madhavdasji was filled with a shy, overflowing joy, and without even going in to see her, he turned and continued on toward Nilachala. No one, not even Nabhadas who first set his name into verse, tells us with any certainty when he was born or exactly how long he lived. Some later tellings place him among the early circle of Madhavendra Puri, drawn afterward into the great tide of devotion that followed Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu through Puri, and credit him with several Braj Bhasha compositions of his own, among them a telling of the Lord's dhyana-lila; the commentator who first gathered these stories went so far as to compare him to Vyasa himself, saying that just as Vyasa once distilled the Vedas and the Puranas into the nectar of the Bhagavata, so Madhavdasji distilled every scripture he knew into vernacular song that ordinary people could sing their way across the ocean of this world by. Other tellings say only that he was a man of learning before grief remade him, and leave it there. The uncertainty does not trouble the story he left behind. What has been kept, retold, and sung for centuries is simpler than any date: that a grieving man once lay down on a beach with nothing left to lose, and found that the very Lord he had given everything up for was already lying down beside him, ready, if it came to it, to take the beating meant for his back and shiver through his winters and wash his failing body with his own two hands. Whoever reads this tonight, tired and unconvinced of very much, might notice that the story never once asks them to be worthy first. It only asks them to lie down at the edge of their own particular difficulty, however small or however large, and see who is already kneeling there.